IN JAPAN THE CRICKETS CRY
BY Ronald Clements & Steve Metcalf
Monarch Books. 224 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-1-85424 9708
This book is hard to put down. It begins with a small boy in a missionary family, growing up in a tribal village in southwest China.
In 1934 at the age of six, Steve’s life changed forever when his parents took him to join his sister at the China Inland Mission (CIM) Chefoo school in north China. In 1937 the Japanese occupation of north China ended his annual Christmas visits home and the Pearl Harbour attack finally severed communication with his parents and the whole school was moved to the Weifang (Weihsien) POW Internment camp. But there the gold medallist Eric Liddell had a profound influence on this teenager which changed the course of his life.
Steve walked out of the camp soon after VJ Day and at 17 made his own way back to Australia, where the family were at last reunited. A few years later he joined the new CIM team going to serve in a poverty-stricken Japan in the aftermath of the war and describes the struggle foreigners had adjusting to a different language and culture. The CIM/OMF team moved to northern Japan where churches were few, and Steve describes how they tackled pioneer evangelism and how people responded. Today those small struggling groups have become established churches led by Japanese pastors. Since Steve’s retirement, the Lord has opened for him unimaginable doors for witness.
This is an extraordinary story. It could stimulate discussion in house groups concerned with evangelism and church planting. It could give church members and missionary committees a deeper understanding of what church planting involves. (Is church planting still a priority in missionary strategy?) It raises questions about missionary families. (How far are we prepared to go to make Jesus known?) When Jesus called his disciples to make disciples of all nations, teaching and preaching, where did he draw the boundaries? The war led this family through years of pain and yet this book also shows how the Lord went with them through the dark valleys and provided for them time and again.
